Sam closed her eyes. "And he"s been asking exactly the same people we have."
"Yeah. Experts on weird incidents. Impossible creatures."
115 "That"s why they didn"t mention him," said Sam. "Your whole network it"s compromised."
"And, when he wanted to reel us in, he had Walter lead us right into a trap."
Opening her eyes again was an effort. The Doctor was looking right at her, a frown furrowing the lines of his face.
"But what does he want want?" he said.
Three smaller cages flanked the large, empty one. Griffin opened the door of one of them. He gently lowered the newborn kid to the floor of her new home.
The little animal shivered in a mixture of confusion and acceptance.
The lion cub tried to growl, wobbling on her baby paws. The sound turned into a mew. Only the dragon had not been reduced to infancy, coiled in a fat black heap in the third cage, filling it to the top. Or perhaps she had; there was still so little known about the creatures from the more exotic three-s.p.a.ces.
The dragon would go in Griffin"s box. She was now precisely the sort of creature in which the Society would be interested. The other two were of no consequence; he could release them in some nearby wooded area. The fact of their existence was enough.
There. He had shown it could be done: the separation of one of these component creatures into its const.i.tuent biodata. The information biological, ontological, historical was discrete rather than additive. Any fanciful being, any combination of species, could be reversed, could be distilled back into its original essences.
Put right. Put back to the way it should should be. be.
Griffin regarded the three cages, the empty large cage, with the quiet satisfaction of a collector whose collection is in order.
Chapter Eleven.
Kyra.
Sam let Fitz knock on the door. He knew this woman, he"d made the phone call, he should handle the explanations. She stood back and smiled as a dark-haired, middle-aged woman appeared, blinking at them.
Was this what it was like to be on the other side of the door?
"Ah, sorry, Kyra," Fitz began, "I hate to disturb you at this hour "
"It"s vitally important!" Oh great, jump right in there, Doctor. "We need to know about someone who"s come to you. It"s a matter of life and death!"
Before anyone could stop him, he"d barged through the door and started whirlwinding through the lounge. His flapping coat knocked the stack of newspapers on the coffee table out of kilter.
"Hey! Wait! Who?" shouted Kyra.
"Ah, um, friend of mine," Fitz improvised. "Sorry about this, he"s being badly affected by disturbances in the ley lines."
The Doctor had gusted into the kitchen. Sam, Fitz, and Kyra followed by default, the door slamming shut behind them.
"I don"t care what you"re being affected by," said Kyra to the Doctor"s back as he stared at her notice board. Her hair was a tangled explosion around her head. "Don"t you come stomping into my home like " She caught a coffee cup as the Doctor turned sharply, elbowing it off the table.
The Doctor stood suddenly, perfectly still. He raised a finger. "What does he call himself?"
Kyra planted her hands on her hips, shooting Fitz a fiery glare. "To whom are you referring?"
"He came to you because you"d been recommended." The Doctor swept up a pile of plates from the table and stacked them lopsidedly in the sink. "Because he"d been asking questions. Asking around. All the people interested in fairies and filksongs and little green men, the world one step away from reality."
117.
The Doctor hefted something from the back of the kitchen chair. Sam stared it was a big, chunky lizard. "And when he started asking about the "ley lines"
they sent him to the expert in the field. They sent him to you."
It was an iguana, Sam realised, almost a metre long. The big reptile clung sleepily to the Doctor"s arm as he zapped Kyra with his best hot-blue stare.
"Griffin," said Kyra.
The Doctor looked at the iguana, puzzled.
"He called himself Griffin," she said. "You"d better sit down before you knock anything else over."
"Black," said Sam.
"White with two sugars, please," said Fitz.
Kyra"s kitchen was thickening with the percolator smell. "What about you, Doctor?"
He shook his head, trying to get the iguana to latch on to the curtain. Sam didn"t want to imagine what he"d be like on a caffeine buzz.
"Mr Griffin told me he"d come here to study the strange wildlife people keep spotting. The dragons and such." Kyra was conducting a bizarre bit of alchemy with her own cup, adding a pinch of this and a teaspoon of that.
"And gryphons," muttered the Doctor. "I don"t suppose the name he gave you sounded even the slightest bit questionable, did it?"
Kyra shot him a look. "I"ve got friends named Raven Moonstone and Venus O"Willendorf. Why should I care what he calls himself?"
"Never mind." The Doctor had discovered the iguana"s home, a tall cage filled with climbing shelves. He tried lowering his arm into the cage.
"He"s doing a study. Cla.s.sifying and sorting out the impossible creatures.
Accounting for them, he said." She brought a tray of cups to the table, where Fitz and Sam sat.
"Funny thing was," she said, "he wasn"t good at telling the imaginary ones from the real ones. He took my poor little pet for a dragon. I had to show him picture books before he got the idea."
"He"s not from Earth," said the Doctor, deadpan. Which is difficult to do with a lizard on your arm, thought Sam.
"Ah," said Kyra. "Well, that would explain a few things."
"He means it," said Fitz.
"I"m sure he does," said Kyra. "Griffin did tell me to keep an eye out for someone like you. You"re a rival scientist. Or something. Right?"
118.
"No," said the Doctor. "I"m a specimen. One he"d like to account for in as permanent a fashion as possible, I suspect."
Kyra took a deep breath. "I see."
"I want to impress upon you what a serious matter this is," said the Doctor, pulling a face at the iguana. "We need your help. This Griffin, this unnaturalist, has already led us into a trap. Now it"s his turn."
Kyra sat back, folding her arms. "Which of you am I supposed to believe?"
"Us, of course," beamed the Doctor. With his free hand, he swept up their empty cups from the table and headed for the sink.
Kyra just watched him. The Doctor paused, a bottle of washing-up liquid in his hand.
"Do you know why he"s interested in dragons?" he said, softly. Kyra shook her head. "He collects them," said the Doctor. He turned back to the cup.
They sat there for a few moments, in silence except for the splashing in the sink. The Doctor put the mugs on a wooden rack to dry. Kyra said nothing.
"You know," said Sam, "I was just thinking a few days ago, I was in your place. In my flat, with the Doctor spouting all of these bizarre things at me.
But you"ve got to understand. It"s all real. It really is all real."
"I know that, girl," said Kyra irritably. "I"m a G.o.dd.a.m.n witch."
"Good," said the Doctor, cruising back. "Excellent. Have an iguana." Kyra peeled her pet from his arm. "Here"s the plan."
Kyra had fed them lentil soup from a huge old iron pot. "Guaranteed newt-free,"
she had said. Sam had eyed her plateful suspiciously.
Now the Doctor was in the kitchen, tinkering with the tags. He was using a combination of jeweller"s screwdrivers and cutlery from Kyra"s kitchen drawers, fiddling with the five-dimensional innards of the flat metal discs.
Sam was idly wondering where the witch kept her stash. She lay back on the sofa, trying to let the exhaustion sink out of her into the worn fabric.
Fitz was clenched like a fist at the other end of the sofa, watching Kyra make the the phone call. Kyra sat on a wooden chair, elbows resting on a round-end table, the phone clutched between her ear and shoulder. phone call. Kyra sat on a wooden chair, elbows resting on a round-end table, the phone clutched between her ear and shoulder.
She had dialled a long, long weird number. "You can hear all of these clicks and clunks," she said, "like your call is being rerouted via Alpha Centauri."
Fitz started to say something, but Kyra held up her hand for silence. "Yeah?
h.e.l.lo? Hi, it"s me."
Sam tried hard to relax, but her heart was jerking, her hands and feet and skull remembering. Kyra said, "I"ve got something new for you, if you"re inter-119.
ested. Yes. A new node. It"s an area I hadn"t explored before. Up in Mount Tam National Park. You still got that map I gave you? OK, hang on, here are the co-ordinates."
She waited. Sam imagined she could hear the unnaturalist"s voice worming through the telephone. Could he see them through the wires? Could he reach right through the phone and get them?
Kyra said, "Could you not bring those grey men of yours? Look, they frighten the h.e.l.l out of me. They always look as though they"re just about to pull off my arms, or something. Yeah. Yes. How"s noon? Yeah, OK. I"ll see you then."
She put down the phone. Fitz partly uncurled. Sam reached her feet out along the length of the sofa, pushed her toes against him in a tiny gesture of comfort.
Fitz fl.u.s.tered, "Well? Is it OK? What did he say?"
"He"ll meet me there," she said. "He bought the Mount Tam thing it"s miles away from the leys, but he doesn"t know that. It should be nice and quiet there."
Kyra sat back, smoothing her wild ma.s.s of hair into place. "This is more like it,"
she said. "Like the old days."
"The old days?" said Fitz.
Kyra pointed at a framed picture on the wall. "See that?"
Fitz got up. "The painting?"
"A friend of mine did it. Look. It"s based on the news photo see the smaller frame next door?"
Fitz turned to look at the newspaper clipping. It was framed behind gla.s.s, neat columns of text dangling from a big photo of people struggling. Student protest turns violent, said the headline.
The painting was kind of abstract, until you looked a bit closer. You could start to make out people in those swirls of colour, a face distorted with anger here, a raised fist there, a couple of people carrying something.
"That"s me being strangled by the policeman," said Kyra.
"Nice," said Fitz, staring at the clipping.
"People cared back then," said Kyra. "We cared. The kids these days, being a hippie, to them it"s a fashion. They dress up like rebels. We were were rebels." rebels."
"I went on a violent student protest once," said Sam, yawning. "At least, that"s what the paper said it was. Somebody broke a door handle, I think."
She was pleased when Kyra gave her a look of veiled surprise. She leaned back in her flared jeans and size-too-small T-shirt, doing her best not to look like the radical high-school type. "They have to package you like that," said Kyra. "If you"re violent students, you"re just kids acting up. Maybe they admire 120 your principles, in a vague sort of way. But they"ve got to pigeonhole you.
Otherwise they might have to take you seriously. G.o.d forbid, you might even really challenge what they think."
"Oh, right on on," Fitz snapped, out of nowhere. "After all, if the students did take over, everything would be suddenly cool, right?"
There was a sudden abrupt silence on all sides. Sam started to ask him where on Earth that had come from, but before she could the Doctor emerged from the kitchen, pleased with himself.
"There"s a definite pattern to the biodata," he announced. "At first I thought the distribution of strands and nodes was random, but there"s some sort of strange attractor at work."
"Speaking of strange attractors," said Sam, pointing. Kyra"s pet had returned to the Doctor"s person, and was draped sleepily over his shoulder.
"If Griffin hasn"t worked out the maths," the Doctor said, "we have a great advantage. We should be able to work out where any unmapped nodes are hidden away."
He reached out and took Kyra"s hand. "Now we have your help, we have a real chance of resolving this. Not just Griffin with your maps and your ability to interact with the biodata, we may be able to fold the entire web of biodata back on itself. It could be a way of healing the scar."